The Few, The Proud
by paradiso
Summary: Stella/Mac. Sometimes he sees numbers and equations. Today, there’s just Stella, in her office, telling him about the first time she ever dated a Marine.


**The Few, The Proud**

"The Marines?" his eyebrows would've disappeared from his face altogether had he been anyone other than Mac Taylor.

"That's what I said," Stella replies, dropping another file onto the desk she thinks might one day stand up on two of its legs and resign in protest of the constant weight put upon it.

"Hm," he backs off and watches as she begins to sift through weeks and weeks of paperwork.

It's almost karma, he thinks, that the morning after her first interesting date in awhile (at least, he imagines it had to be interesting for her to come in and tell him about it all of a sudden) he has to put her on desk duty because of all the work that's been piling up. Except that she hates desk duty, and he hates seeing that half-hearted smile she slaps on her face anyways when he makes her checkmark boxes and proof case files.

So this is bad karma, then. This is what she gets for having almost enjoyed herself last night. And just when Mac is about to come to the conclusion that he _must_ be the most shallow, self-serving man on the planet, Stella continues, "He went on and on. Forever."

"About the Marines?"

"Yes. Humanitarian relief, the Korean War, Iraqi freedom," she groaned, "Oh, and scarlet. Scarlet and gold."

He gave her a blank look.

"I was wearing blue," she shook her head absentmindedly, "He's going back to the reserves this fall."

"That's a whole four months away."

"Yeah well, hopefully that blue dress turned him off enough for him to never call me again."

Mac sees a clean-shaven 28-year-old, with the mind of a kid. He bets it's a kid, anyhow. Still driven entirely by hormonal impulses, and thrilled at the idea of a night out at a grown-up restaurant with an older woman, and then put off because of her attire.

He catches Stella staring at him out of the corner of her eye and realizes for the first time that she's looked at him like this countless time before. Those times when his mind wanders off on its own and sees things that aren't really there at the moment, but maybe have been before, or will be there sometime in the near future. Sometimes he sees numbers and equations. Today, there's just Stella, in her office, telling him about the first time she ever dated a Marine.

_More like a Marine Corps fanboy,_ he says to himself, and tries not to think of himself a few decades ago, before Beirut.

When he looks back at her again, after barely stopping himself from disappearing into an alternate reality once more, her gaze is gone from him. He's laughs at himself momentarily, thinks blindly that she's given up on him for the moment, and has chosen her paperwork over the study of him.

"You want to grab some coffee afterwards?" she surprises him, like she always does.

"Afterwards?" he motions to the mound of paper in front of her.

"That's funny Mac. Real funny."

"Well," he pulls up a chair but does not sit down, "Do you think you can stand a half-hour outside of the office with another Marine?"

She tries not to think that he's flirting with her. Mac Taylor does not flirt. He can barely manage a compliment without it sounding forced and professional. Part of Stella doesn't mind that stiff, awkward part of him that prevents him from offering a flattering remark to a woman, because she knows why he's this way. She also suspects that it has something to do with the fact that he's always been so damn stubborn with himself, that he could spend hours picking apart a single sentence and examining each miniscule piece carefully before actually saying it. Even then, most times he says nothing at all.

"I think we should go out and get some coffee, Mac," she replies.

He sits down and picks up a pen, "Sounds good, Stella."

The blinds in the office are shifted slightly, just enough for thin strips of sunlight to make their way into the room. At the back of his mind there's a cherished memory that sings some forgotten song about how Stella likes to work in dim light, especially when the work is boring and tedious. But all this is contradicted by the golden embers that tumble over her normally blue irises.

When she meets his gaze again, she can nearly taste his unasked questions, but does not offer a review of the flavour. In the same courteous way, does Mac ignore how she almost blushes scarlet when at a quarter to ten, he gets up from his chair, holds the door open for her and makes good on his promise for coffee.

--

This day is one of many to come, at the coffee shop down the street from the lab, the first one that they come across that isn't a Starbucks. Everything inside speaks to them of mid-spring, from the faux vegetation to the watercolour floor. It's beautiful.

"His name was Michael," she says once they're seated again.

Together again.

"Who?"

"The Marine."

"Right."

Then, as though she's wants to know why the sky is blue, she asks, "What happened with you and Peyton?"

He wants to be angry with her, but he isn't at all. He can never be angry with Stella. Times like these, when she looks at him with nothing but pure, scientific interest in her eyes, it's _himself_ he can't stand.

"How'd you know?"

"That long, sick scowl on your face when you stepped off the plane? I picked you up at the airport."

"That wasn't it. I was upset about the 3:33 a.m. phone calls."

"Oh," she decides to leave that mystery for the next time they work late at the lab, "I saw the letter..."

There's no hint of shame in her eyes. It's as though she doesn't care at all that Peyton's letter was meant for his eyes only, and that he has every right to be upset at her for snooping into his personal life. But when he looks at her, she just stares back with a blank, questioning aura to her. For a brief, sad, moment, he wonders if she'd deduced the outcome of his relationship with Peyton on her own, and that the letter had just been a solid confirmation of her theory.

"Then you know what happened," in an instant, he's distant again, away in a different world with no numbers, no answers, no Stella.

Somewhere where the towers fall repeatedly, their ruins morphing into the sand and dust from Beirut. Then Peyton, and her sorry words. It's a world of hurt, and it's written all over his face.

"I'm sorry."

"It's okay, it wasn't your fault," and unexpectedly, he adds, "I should've seen it coming..."

She wants to protest because she thinks he knew it all along, but she fears that that could be misread as an insult towards his track record with women who aren't Claire. That would be a laugh though, she smiles and looks to the woman at the counter, then another with a friend in a corner booth, all the women who've checked him out at least once since he stepped into the café with her, Stella.

She brings the coffee to her lips, as though to distract her ever-present curiosity from ruining the afternoon altogether. She's sure she could push him a little more, chase him a little farther from his comfort zone without him getting upset and then closing up abruptly, in which case, the softness in his expression would be replaced by a hard, accusing stare. He's become somewhat more unpredictable as of late, which is good and bad. Good, when she comes into her office after three hours of sleep and finds a single pink carnation in her coffee mug, accompanied by a carrot muffin. Bad when he comes in on three hours of sleep (or no sleep at all) and snaps at everything that moves.

Another look at him, in the bright light of the room, and she decides to prove herself a little unpredictable as well. She reaches into her bag, and pulls out a stack of paper.

"Let's get to work," she pulls out a pen and opens a file.

She's disappointed when she fails to surprise him. His face is blank if not for the ghost of a smile upon his lips as he pulls a file towards himself. He's a master of masks, but she can usually see through him, and there isn't a single part of him that is taken aback by her request for a change of scenery for longer than fifteen minutes a day.

They work in silence, the same way they always do, except on the days when he's feeling optimistic enough to let her charm and amuse him with her pointless chatter.

Stella tries not to wince when Peyton's words ring true in her ears, _The moment I hear your voice, I will be lost._

She doesn't know it, but she challenges Mac's earlier suspicions when she tries her hardest to look down at her paper and not at the man before her. This isn't karma at all.

This is irony.

--

There's an unrelenting sense of justice surges through his veins even now, Stella discovers when Mac rises from his seat forty-five minutes later to get another cup of coffee. He returns with a chocolate croissant for her, and she is momentarily surprised.

He shrugs in response, and it's a rare and adorable gesture coming from him, "Thought you might want something sweet."

She just barely remembers to give him a shifty look before he can decipher that it's another blush creeping into her features that she's trying to hide.

"Thank you," she takes a bite, "Want a piece?"

He smiles and shakes his head no.

"You're not a fan of chocolate, Detective Taylor?" she smiles because she knows he despises it.

He looks down at his paperwork and smiles at how much she knows about him, despite the fact that he's so closed up. Inside and out. That's how lonely he is and how well she knows him really.

It's noon before reality calls them back to real world. Flack's voice on Mac's phone sounds weighted and heavy to Stella, and suddenly she feels like the desk in her office personified. Needlessly angered by the reality of the world and powerless to do anything about it. This is all in contrast to the weightlessness she experiences being around Mac outside of the office, when she's free to ask questions and he's loose enough to answer them.

He gathers her paperwork for her and sticks it into his own bag to carry it back to the lab. She doesn't miss the courteous gesture, even though Mac's always the gentleman, so it's easy to forget that he sometimes goes out of his way to be polite.

But not Stella. Stella notices everything. She notices when he smiles just a little because he knows it makes _her_ feel at ease (he doesn't understand that, but he does it anyways), she notices that he goes on holding door for her even though she laughs at him when he does so (it doesn't occur to her that that's part of the reason why he does it at all). She sees everything, every part of him.

In fact, she reads so much into what he's doing right now, offering her his hand when she moves to get up from her chair, and then lets her squeeze it before they go on their way, that she doesn't notice any of the other activity in the room. He wants to think the same thing when there's a flash of orange in front of him, and then a sudden pressure upon his lips.

It happens so fast, that Stella doesn't even have time to blink before the girl pulls back, a Cheshire-cat grin plastered on her face. Mac is completely taken aback, but doesn't know what to do about it, he stands there, stares at the girl, stares through the girl, and can't find any sort of explanation as to what's just happened.

"Thought you might want something sweet," she giggles, and then winks just to add some overall tacky effect to the exchange.

Except that it wasn't an exchange really. It was more like Mac Taylor, frozen in place while a complete stranger presses a forceful kiss to his lips, and then is gone like nothing happened at all.

Stella doesn't know what to do, what to say, so she settles on the only thing she can think of for the moment, and that is to feel. And oh, what a feeling, lost in the middle of a now-shattered afternoon, staring hard at Mac's figure, turned away from her. There's an undeniable pain coursing through her, a feeling in her heart that she had otherwise dismissed as just some childish fantasy her mind had conjured on those lonely nights in her apartment.

But now the feeling is more present than ever, and it is present in it's full, tragic glory. The itch she'd always been afraid to scratch for fear of what might come pouring out was suddenly torn away, and she was left to deal with the full brunt of her previously unacknowledged feelings for Mac Taylor. Feelings that by now she's sure, have gone beyond the lines of professional concern and the boundaries of a close friendship. And for one horrible moment, she's terrified that things will never be the same again, and that she'll never be able to call him her friend.

As for Mac, he's gone over the edge finally. And a large part of him mourns the fact that he has lost himself again, that he's back to square one with his feelings (or lack thereof).

Seeing him there, still and solemn with a new approach to stoicism, Stella wants to just whiz past him with a cheesy "Well, to the bat mobile!" and never speak of this day again.

It's Mac who realizes that a comedic spin to this... this... he can't think of a word, but making a joke of it all would be unfair to both of them. His heart drops to his feet when Stella walks past him, opens and closes the door for herself, then waits outside for him. It's like there's a new wall between them, and he wants to wonder why, but there's no room for wonder when he knows exactly what's going on.

--

A week goes by before their eyes meet again. This time it's his office, at the end of the night. The day has left him tired and curious, while she is wound tight. He can tell by the way she walks flawlessly atop a pair of pencil-thin stilettos that there's a ring of tension wrapped tightly around her mind. This is unusual, since the case is over, the criminal convicted, to be sentenced the day after tomorrow.

And yet, she hasn't relaxed. She's in a turtleneck today, odd for the humid temperature in the city. She's curling inwards on herself, pulling herself away (from him?) and into a shadow that keeps her from meeting with him.

"Are you going to tell me just why you've been avoiding me?" he asks suddenly, and she mistakes his desperation for anger.

"Mac," she glares at him when he doesn't even glance at the file she's placed on his desk.

He says nothing. She's irritated.

"Fine," she walks around his desk and when he shows no sign of objection, she pulls the stapler from the first drawer and sandwiches her papers between it, "Goodnight, Mac."

But it isn't a good night at all, for either of them. Different reasons of course, but that doesn't matter because whatever their excuses are, they're always trying to avoid the same thing. For him, it's that the day was hard, and the week, even harder without her. For Stella, she knows it's a bad time for this conversation, a bad night (yet she claims to his face that it's a good one).

"You can't just ignore me forever," he says quietly, making sure that it doesn't come out sounding like an order.

"No. I can't. And I'm not, considering that I'm right here in your office."

He's getting somewhere, he thinks, because she has turned around and is standing in the dim light of the corridor. She's on the other side of the glass, just a few feet away, and for once it's him doing the pushing, and it's her repelling him, trying to escape from him, trying to be cold and distant.

"Stella," he reaches around the door, looks at her serenely.

She wants to sigh as she steps back into his office and he closes the door behind her.

"What is this?" he asks softly.

"There is no 'this' Mac."

"Are you angry with me?"

"No."

"Then why won't you talk to me?"

"There's nothing to _say_. My case is solved, there's your paperwork. What exactly do you want to talk about now?"

He can't say. He can't start it. They have to come to some sort of mutual decision to talk about the day in the café, the red-headed stranger who made off with the memory of a stolen kiss, a stunned and surprised Mac Taylor left behind.

Stella wants to ask, but she can't start anything either. It's too risky, she's too emotional, anything could happen. She doesn't do 'anything', she only ever does things that she's sure of, things with rational outcomes that take her places other than her lonely bed. He wants to talk, but she's already gone off somewhere, the way that he usually does, off in a different place. He realizes, he has no place in her other world.

Which is exactly why she's in exile there.

--

She leaves the office physically, and isn't aware of his footsteps behind her until she's half a block down the road.

"We live on opposite sides of the city," she says, a tinge of regret in her voice.

"I'm not going home."

She turns on her heel and stares him down, challenges him. It's like, if he can make it through this staring contest alive, she'll go on her merry way and accept that he would follow her to the ends of the earth if she would only look at him again, really_ look_ at him for the first time in a week.

Has it only been that long? He wonders, watching as her unruly curls bounce around her shoulders as she walks. Just one week without Stella, and he's already crawling back to her like some agonized pet. His misery goes unnoticed until Kingston and Murray, at which point, she turns and faces him again.

"Please Stella," he looks around desperately, searching for a place.

His eyes briefly pass over a small Italian restaurant. He nods to himself and decides, _that's it_.

"Let's have dinner."

"Fine."

He doesn't say anything after that, just takes her by the hand and leads her towards the restaurant, feeling quite uncertain of himself. He grips her fingers tightly, the way a parent might guide a child, to keep her from running away again.

"For two?" asks the lone hostess.

Mac nods in reply.

"We're closing in forty-five minutes, is that alright?"

"Fine," he glances at Stella, whose hand is limp in his.

The restaurant is close to being deserted, yet the hostess leads them to the most ordinary table in the entire restaurant, situated next to a wall. Not in a corner, far from a window, far from any decorative statues. Just a regular table, one of the less-desired ones, he supposes.

It's perfect.

Mac orders for her, a plate of gnocchi in rose sauce, something elaborate and over the top. It's not that she's high maintenance, he just feels like treating her. The food arrives, and it's delicious, he thinks as he takes a bite of his own chicken parmesan. He hopes she thinks so too, as she takes a cautious bite of her own dinner. It's almost a compromise, in case when they finally get to talking and everything explodes in face, he would have at least bought her a nice dinner for all her trouble.

"I remember now," he begins, sitting back in his chair, "I interviewed her a month ago. It was the case with the gutted college girls."

Stella puts down her fork but says nothing in response. So he continues.

"She had plenty inappropriate comments to make, but you have to know, I never thought I'd see her again. I just dismissed it at that, then, that day... at the coffee shop... Stella, I don't even know what to say, except that if you're angry at me, or if I've hurt you in some way, I'm truly sorry. You're my best friend Stella, talk to me, please."

Stella is surprised, and had every reason to be. This is Mac after all, the ever-stoic, always professional, bitter, jaded detective. More than that even, he's a scientist. And he has made one of the biggest mistakes in his scientific career just there, in front of her. He's jumping to conclusions.

An undoubtedly true one, but still, a conclusion that he has no evidence to support. The faintly bemused look on her face chastised him for his mistake.

"Unless..." his eyes widened, "Unless that wasn't it at all. Unless you're angry for... for a completely different reason and I just went and assumed that-"

He cuts himself off, the plate of food in front of him suddenly becoming very intriguing to his glare.

Stella studies him closely, slumped forward slightly in his chair, torn between confusion and embarrassment and unsure if this entire outing had been a mistake. Her gut tells her she _should_ have been angry about his assumption and thrown everything in his face. Should have told him to get off his high horse and stop thinking that he knows everything about her. Should have said it isn't the day in the coffee shop that has her so tense, that a kiss from a stranger didn't bother her more than it bother him.

But that's exactly it. As he sits there in a cloud of merciless doubt, she knows his words to be the truth.

They need something. They need to be back on track. This can't go on much longer she knows, it's like there's a magnetic energy between them. She can't stay away. It's happened before, unexpected rifts in their relationship, but this is the first time that he has cracked before her, followed her out of the office, took her out to dinner to explain things.

Something has changed.

She leans back and realizes that the last time she was comfortable and at ease in a chair, she was sitting across from Mac Taylor with a pile of paperwork, two cups of coffee, and a chocolate croissant between them. He looks up and isn't sure whether or not it's too soon to be relieved.

But he's certain when she gives him a genuine smile and says, "Tell me about the Marines."

--

They are hand in hand on the way back to her apartment, but it is different this time. He slowly twists his hand in hers and laces their fingers together. _The way a lover would_, she thinks and shivers.

She barely has time to reprimand the hopeless romantic inside of her head before he surprises her again when they reach the stairs to the door. Then his arm is around her waist, and she's pulled easily against him.

"I'll take you up," he whispers when the reach the elevator.

They pull apart once inside the car, because being that close to him in such a small, confined area, Stella thinks would have been too much for her. This is all too much.

She glances at him through the corner of her eye and sees him smiling at the glowing numbers up ahead.

He's smiling.

At the numbers.

She shakes her head with a smile and thinks, _I'm drowning here._

She skips ahead of him on the Twenty-First floor, looking back at him briefly with a childish grin spread across her face. She isn't surprised when he smiles back.

"Well," she looks at him when they reach her door.

"Yes?"

She rolls her eyes and pulls him into a hug, thinking that they'll just leave it at that, go into work tomorrow, and everything will be the same.

Then she rests her head in the crook of his neck and he knows then that nothing will ever be the same. She closes her eyes and his words play in her mind. Back there, in the restaurant, he spoke of Beirut, and his days with the Marines.

"_More than anything, those nights were lonely. We were all there, together, in a little tent just outside of the zone. But it was just the six of us, against the world, and there was nothing else going through my head but that. Then morning came, and you know, I've never been so proud in my life."_

"Stella, are you still with me?"

She looks up at him, her face just inches away, "Yes, I'm here."

"Good."

He tilts his head just a little to the right, and they're so close already it's as though his breath draws her into the kiss. He's lost again, but it's a wonderful feeling because she's lost too, and they're together somewhere far away from Stella's door, from her apartment, from the city.

There's no numbers, no answers (no questions asked), no orphanages, no bits of shrapnel against his back. There's nothing, there's everything.

It's a new world.

**fin.**

_August 2008._


End file.
